Wednesday, July 27, 2011

After breaking the ice at WhyMCAPaolo and I decided to submit a talk for the 8th Italian Agile Day which will be held in Rome on november 19, 2011. Then we lost a bit of control of the situation and submitted three :-)

Unlike most of the presentations we have seen delivered in the previous editions, mainly about technology and methods, which are the expected core subjects of the conference, we have submitted a proposal for a talk about business aspects.

We still don't know whether one or more of our presentations will be accepted; at the moment they're in for the perfection game, in which other submitters and the organizers can give their feedback on the title and the abstract of our talk to help us improve them (or to rule us out).

The abstract so far:

Startup without falldown: strategic planning beyond wishful thinking

Creating an app, even if successful, does not mean creating a startup. A startup serves the purpose of discovering and validating a sustainable business model, so the first thing your financial backers ask you is a business plan.

The best way to create one is to dice a little (the best dice are the multi-sided ones used in D&D as they add a nice variance to the results) and put the outcomes on an Excel file, possibly coupled with a presentation filled with bullet points, incomprehensible charts and never ending description blended with bad quality images.

And then? then you clash with the market.

Luckily there are alternative tools: together we'll see how to combine customer development and the business model canvas to analyze the business and to validate the chosen model.